You’d think that someone whose proclamations just seem to make gamers hate him would stop talking, but Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney, who recently presided over staggering layoffs because of his corporate management, will never stop talking. This time, he’s weighing in over on Invenglobal on why your games fail and why his MMOs will be different.
First, he declares that his new “innovative programming and networking model” called STM will revolutionize MMOs. What he’s describing sounds basically identical to what metaverse-esque developers have been claiming for like a decade, all the way back to SpatialOS when it was supposedly going to rescue the MMO genre.
“While Fortnite Battle Royale currently accommodates 100 players per session, we aim to create an environment that can host hundreds, thousands, or even millions of concurrent players in a single world without requiring developers to learn complex distributed server programming architectures,” he says. “The key is to build these massive worlds while maintaining a simple yet powerful programming model. While existing MMOs have used complex, error-prone network programming techniques to create such massive worlds, our goal is to democratize this high-level technology so that anyone can use it intuitively.”
Sweeney also mentions several major problems confronting the game industry that (of course) he thinks he can solve with tool performance – specifically, “labor and infrastructure costs” that aren’t being serious about revenue floors. “If it costs $100 million to make a single AAA game, but the revenue floor expected in the market is only $50 million, no game company can continue this risky investment under a capitalist structure,” he says. He’s so close to getting it!
Another problem he calls out is what we might call the social founder effect inherent in large gaming communities. “[T]here is another unique barrier in the multiplayer live game ecosystem,” he observes. “Users tend to enjoy games with their actual friend groups, and it is nearly impossible to move that entire group of friends from an existing game to a completely new one. Only the massive mega-hits that appear once every few years succeed in this community migration. This is the decisive reason why many multiplayer new releases have failed one after another recently. Users have already formed solid human networks in Fortnite, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, and Apex Legends; there is no reason to leave friends behind and go to a new game alone.”
Of course, he again suggests his tech – a “cross-game social link feature” in UE6, coupled with what sounds like blockchain tech – can solve this problem, as it would allow (for example) gamers to “form parties via voice chatting with friends in Game B while connected to Game A,” which you need to have in your engine for some reason even though Discord exists? “If asset ownership is linked between games, rare items acquired in other games can be brought to the new game for verification, providing users with a strong economic motive and justification to play the new game,” he concludes.
Again, this sounds functionally identical to what Raph Koster was describing years ago before the metaverse was coopted by blockchain and then gen AI grifts, so it’s not new, and it’s still not clear that being connected to everyone everywhere at all times in every game is something actual gamers really want… especially in 2026 when “success” in gaming is a whole lot more variable and nuanced than whether you can make Fortnite or Roblox money.
